Author: Jack Marshall

This Would Be The Most Unethical Tweet Of Any Normal Year, But The 2019 Competition Is Too Tough…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Observations:

  • I can’t respect anyone who would support a candidate who could think this, much less publish it, to be President of the United States.
  • By the way, did you know that President Trump is a threat to democracy? Bernie has said so many times.
  • Sanders really needs to bone up on what “democracy,” “rule of law,” “due process,” “ex post facto,” and other core concepts mean.
  • Trump puts out tweets like this occasionally, suggesting that there “should” be some way to legally penalize various individuals who do things that are completely legal. This usually spawns angry, insulting and indignant op eds all over the media. I will patiently wait for the equivalent reaction to Bernie’s tweet. In vain.
  • Will anyone ask Sanders about this sentiment in the next debate?
  • For a U.S. Senator and political leader to state that it is appropriate to imprison U.S. citizens for the non-existent crime of not conforming to progressive cant is itself undermining democracy.
  • Yet Presidential candidates who do this should not be criminally prosecuted for the destruction they are knowingly causing. They should  be ridiculed, condemned, and ignored.

Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, 9/14/2019: “You Made Me Slam You (I Didn’t Want To Do It)” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Welcome!

1.  To be fair to Kerry Roberts, while we should not and cannot eliminate colleges, this is also true…From The American Thinker:

….Sarah Sanders made one of the best observations in recent weeks when, reflecting on the Democrats running for president, she observed, “I’m pretty sure they don’t even like America.”  She’s right.  They don’t.  For those who are wondering how the Democrats could have produced such a distinguished slate of the sanity-challenged, it is because of radical liberal control of America’s colleges and universities.  The Marxist radicals of yesterday became college professors of today, seizing ideological control of much of America….American universities are radicalizing an increasingly large share of America.  This is aided by the fact that nearly 70% of kids now go to college, where most of them are taught not to think. Every candidate on stage is convinced that the lion’s share of Democrat primary voters are radical Marxists.  Sadly, they’re all largely right, which is why any candidate who sounds remotely reasonable is running about the same percentage of voter support as you.  These candidates should know their voters, since every one of them is likely a product of America’s universities.  It is hard to overstate the damage this institution is inflicting on America but that outcome was on full display during the Democrat debate.

2.  Stipulated: Using PolitiFact as an authority in any political debate is proof that the user is either so biased he can’t recognize partisan slant when it’s right under his nose, or lying. I remember how most of the Ethics Alarms boycotters from the progressive collective, before they turned tail and ran, liked to cite the obviously manipulative fact-check service, the worst of the worst, if you don’t count Snopes. (FactCheck.org, though leftward tilting, is by far the fairest one of all, according to my magic ethics mirror on the wall…) Kudos, then, to Ted Cruz, who took the time to point out in a tweet:

“Just a reminder, when I said it, PolitiFact (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC) rated ‘Beto wants to take our guns’ as FALSE,.” “Maybe they should buy one of his new t-shirts.”

You know..these:

Now I’m tempted to imitate Cruz’s tweak with my Facebook friends who indignantly protested when I described their favorite party as the champion of open borders, gun confiscation, and late-term abortion. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

 Ethics Alarms master commenter Mrs. Q has the highest ratio of Comments of the Day to comments of any of the erudite participants here. If she would consider it, I’d love to feature her ethical musings in a regular column on the blog. This is the first of two Mrs. Q compositions you will see this weekend; it concerns the issues of euthanasia and consent, which were explored in twoposts this week, and a poll. Regarding that: here is the still live survey regarding the hypothetical I posed in this follow-up to the one about the Dutch doctor:

As you can see, those supporting the opposite position of Mrs. Q (and me) are in a distinct minority.

Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day, a reply to another commenter,  on the post, “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study.”

My God fearing Catholic grandma had the opposite response to yours. She was 102 & 7mo. and after breaking her hip it was too late to even think of surgery. She continued to weaken & lose weight yet she fought by drinking milkshakes & trying to greet her many family/visitors.

Before she got to this point a few years prior, her care coordinator somehow changed her directive to DNR, which as a Catholic she wouldn’t have agreed to, yet this person tried to convince the family that my grandma said yes to the change. If my family hadn’t checked the paperwork, my grandma’s incorrect and unauthorized change would have remained; however our family changed it back. My understanding is such acts are not uncommon in these facilities.

Fast forward to her last days. She was increasingly given higher doses of morphine & we weren’t allowed to even give her sips of water, though she was clearly thirsty. Her last words ever spoken while she gripped onto me, and heard by everyone in the room were “I don’t want to die.” She didn’t want to go and the nursing home was killing her and she knew it.

I still feel complicit in her death, as I tried to “go along” with staff who I assumed knew best. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Senator Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.”

Democratic Presidential nominee hopeful Senator Kamala Harris, responding to Joe Biden’s 100% correct observation that a President could not ban so-called “assault weapons” by executive order as Harris had pledged she would, due to the Constitution.

When I was preparing yesterday’s post on the ABC Democratic candidates debate, this statement, which made my head explode at the time it was delivered, was supposed to have a prominent place. Then I couldn’t find it in the transcript. Why? I’m an idiot, that’s why. Somehow I got it in my head that the speaker was Elizabeth Warren, not Harris, so I was searching the transcript for her, and not finding the exchange. Finally I gave up.

Luckily Ann Althouse was similarly nauseated by the same Harris quote, and posted about it on her blog later in the day. Among the truly scary statements, and there were many of them, during the debate (ask your Democratic friends if they can name a single similarly outrageous policy-related quote during any of the 2015 and 2016 debates  by candidates of either party) I rank Harris’s as #1, followed by Beto’s epic “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47…” and Biden’s ridiculous “Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime” statement. (Incidentally, he launched a fun parlor game: see if you can top other players with the most sinister character who would have avoided prison time under Joe’s formula. My favorite: Al Capone). Continue reading →

Friday Ethics “Kung Fu” Reflections, 9/13/2019: “Seek Not To Know The Answers, But To Understand The Questions.”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Welcome, Ethics Grasshoppers!

Come to think of it, grasshoppers are not particularly ethical. Does anyone even recognize references to “Kung Fu” and Master Po any more?  It had a Caucasian actor (David Carradine) playing an Asian hero, so I guess it’s considered racist now.

Never mind.

I need a drink…

1. One more note about last night’s debate...I was listening to NPR’s efforts to spin the debate this morning. A Democratic consultant, who hardly could have been surprised by the question, was asked “Who won?” He paused, stammered and said, unconvincingly, “The Democratic Party?”  Exactly! As conservative wag Stephen Kruiser wrote today,

They don’t want you armed and able to protect yourself.

They don’t want you taking care of your children.

They don’t want you making your own decisions about your healthcare.

They want you to pay more in taxes for the privilege of losing your freedoms.

What’s not to like?

2.  The new book “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” reveals more details about the efforts by lawyers David Boies and Lisa Bloom (the victims advocate and daughter of Gloria Allred) to protect Harvey Weinstein from having his predations on women revealed. In one memorable memo the book shows to the world, Lisa Bloom wrote to Weinstein in December 2016 laying out a multistep playbook on how to intimidate accusers or represent them as liars. Regarding actress Rose McGowan, who claims to have been raped by Weinstein and who has since become a visible activist regarding his conduct and that of other Hollywood figures, Bloom wrote,

“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them….We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”

Not surprisingly, McGowan is furious, and said of Bloom, “Her email is staggering. Staggering! …This woman should never work again. Lisa Bloom should be disbarred. So should David Boies.” Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The ABC Democratic Candidates Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

1, The overwhelming impression one—well, this one—got from last night’s depressing Democratic candidates debate is that the United States of America has somehow painted itself into a corner where one of the worst characters in American political history is nonetheless the shaky human firewall against a calculated overthrow of the American experiment by a sickening conspiracy of power-seeking demagogues, democracy-defacing socialists , individual liberties-rejecting totalitarians, and, of course, and a news media that self-righteously views itself as the propaganda agent for all of these.  In the immortal words of Chester A. Riley,  wing riveter at the fictional Cunningham Aircraft plant in California, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”

But here we are.

2. Symbolic of the plight was the sight of long-time Clintonista and Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos  sitting in the debate moderator’s chair last night. No one who is aware of the ABC host of the news division’s morning and Sunday  show could possibly view his presence as anything but an overlay of bias and a guarantee of soft-ball questions and general favoritism. The problem is that many, perhaps most, of the target audience of last night’s fiasco are not aware of it. Remember 2015, when the GOP hopefuls subjected themselves to the sneering contempt of such leftist moderators as CNBC’s  panel of Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla? Their questions and interjections from the moderators were, as I observed at the time, ” so hostile, so disrespectful, so obviously concocted from a biased perspective,” that there was criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, at least the Republicans were challenged, and they knew that partisan opponents facing them were not going to countenance flagrant misinformation. This is why the DNC’s cowardly decision to freeze Fox News out of the debates was such a transparent effort to avoid fair vetting of the candidates, fair meaning in this case, something more challenging than boot-licking submissiveness. “It was a great debate. I think we learned a lot tonight,” the lackey enthused after it was all over. Did anyone really think that was a great debate? That kind of self-evident spin is supposed to be reserved for people like Tom Perez. Continue reading →

Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, this morning’s post, has attracted a wider range of opinion than I expected. I considered attaching a poll to the original post; now I’m going to go a step farther, and base that poll on a hypothetical of the kind that I use in my legal ethics seminars.

Speaking of those, on Tuesday, September 17, in Richmond, VA, and Wednesday, September 18, in Fairfax, VA, I’ll be presenting  “The Greatest Legal Ethics Seminar Ever Taught!” for three hours of legal ethics CLE credit to Virginia lawyers and others. The title reflects, other than my own warped sense of humor (“The Greatest Story Ever Told” is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen), the fact that the legal ethics hypotheticals being discussed cover what I have found to be many of the most contentious, fascinating legal ethics issues extant over 20 years of doing these things. Moreover, I am being joined by my friend and colleague, John May, who approached these issues from the perspective of a practical litigator as well as one who often defends lawyers accused of ethical improprieties. He’s also one combative and clever pain in the ass who loves disagreeing with me, so I recommend bringing popcorn. The details are here.

Now here’s your hypothetical:

Continue reading →